tourney, or in some sudden aside, such as his comment on Arcite's death-- His spirit chaunged hous, and wente ther, As I cam never, I can nat tellen wher-- do we catch a glimpse of Chaucer's shrewd observation and dry humour. He is learning how to tell a tale, and for the moment his interest lies in the telling. In _Troilus and Criseyde_, his method is very different. Here he is dealing with a love romance, and he does not hesitate to dwell at length upon the sufferings and emotions of his hero and heroine. About a third of the whole work is actual paraphrase or translation of Boccaccio's _Filostrato_: Book IV contains a lengthy extract from Boëthius, and certain passages are drawn from Guido delle Colonne, but the _Filostrato_ forms the basis of the whole. This being so, the first thing we notice is that whereas in the _Knightes Tale_ Chaucer has very considerably cut down his original, here he has enlarged it, for the 5,704 lines of Boccaccio's poem have become 8,329 in the English version. Further, he has taken considerable liberties with the characters themselves. Troilus is in many respects a conventional enough hero. He falls in love with Cressida at first sight and at once despairs of winning her. Handsome, brave, and resolute, he is well fitted to gain the love of any woman, but such is his modesty that he is incapable of helping himself and can do nothing more to the purpose than sit on his bed and groan. The unnecessary mystery made by the lovers, the endless difficulties which they put in their own way, are quite in keeping with the spirit of the age, though even here Chaucer shows a skill in characterisation which almost makes us forget to be impatient with his hero's helplessness. Cressida, while she too has much in common with the conventional heroine of romance, has much that is peculiarly her own. She is beautiful and tender and clinging, as a heroine should be, but her shallow little character has an individuality of its own. It will be treated more fully in a later chapter, here it is sufficient to say that Chaucer transforms the mature woman of Boccaccio's poem into a timid girl, whose youth and inexperience appeal to our pity and make it impossible to judge her harshly. But the most important and characteristic change which Chaucer makes in the story is in the character of Pandarus. Instead of the gay young cousin of Troilus, he gives us the vulgar, gossiping, good-natured old uncle of Cressida, an utterly unimaginative and prosaic person who plays with the fires of passion as ignorantly and light-heartedly as the Nurse in _Romeo and Juliet_. Not only is the character of Pandarus of interest in itself but its creation and its introduction into a poem of this type marks a new development in literature--the study of the common-place. Hitherto, though some rare flash of humour might for an instant lighten the pages of the love romance and give us such an episode as that of the herd-boy in _Aucassin and